Review/Dance; Limon Troupe Salutes Its Artists and Its Past

By ANNA KISSELGOFF

Published: April 27, 1991

The Limon Dance Company is celebrating itself through specific tributes to its dancers in its current two-week season at the Joyce Theater.

The troupe's second program, given Thursday night at the Joyce (175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street), included the world premiere of Alwin Nikolais's "Hollow Lady," a solo commissioned for Nina Watt "to celebrate her artistry and her commitment to the Limon esthetic over the last two decades," as a program note stated. The 1942 "Chaconne" by Jose Limon, who died in 1972, was revived "to honor Gary Masters's distinguished association" with the troupe for the last 21 years. A third program during the season honors the company's artistic director, Carla Maxwell.

In this context, such self-celebration is not as presumptuous as it might at first seem. Miss Watt, for instance, is more than worthy of recognition. She is a perfect Limon dancer, fusing emotion and movement into what becomes deeply humanistic imagery. Mr. Nikolais, a choreographer tuned in to abstraction more than to emotional gesture, understood her versatility.

With sliding metallic noise in his own sound score, Mr. Nikolais has depicted Miss Watt as a human marionette, her dunce cap of stretch fabric attached to a wire overhead. The cap changes shape, as does Miss Watt in Frank Garcia's brown spotted costume. Part Everyman, part wounded animal, she collapses, rises, runs, trips and hangs lifelessly. It is a deep trifle, if that is possible.

Mr. Masters's straight-legged fast turns and proud Spanish carriage complemented rather than merely illustrated the Chaconne from Bach's Second Partita in D minor, which Michael Cherry played on the piano. Once danced by the Mexican-born Limon, this "Chaconne" was inspired by the idea that the dance form of the same name might have originated in Mexico. Yet the solo is pure form. Mr. Masters, matching the clarity of the curved arm gestures with the austerity of his linear lunges, knew how to retard a phrase.

Very different was "Volver," by Carlos Orta, a company member. Set to Argentine tangos, the dance was a well-made if superficial view of a woman's memories of the man who left her after a custody fight over a chair.

Doris Humphrey's "Day on Earth," with Jonathan Leinbach, new in the role and persuasively committed as the father in a distilled life span, completed the program, along with and Limon's 1956 communal view of a more eternal cycle, "There Is a Time." The soloists were Mr. Orta, Emilie Plauche, Gordon White, Roxane D'Orleans Juste, Mr. Leinbach, Pamala Jones and Miss Watt.

Photo: Nina Watt of the Limon Dance Company in "Hollow Lady." (Keith Meyers/The New York Times)